USA Cares' online event platform made the decision to remove the raffle and refund all ticket holders without notifying USA Cares.

Friends of USA Cares,

The “30 Guns, 30 Days” raffle scheduled to begin on March 5, 2018 has been cancelled and I want to share with you why.

On Wednesday, February 28, USA Cares was informed by a “30 Guns, 30 Days” ticket holder that they received an email from our online ticketing platform, Eventbrite, indicating that their ticket would be refunded and the raffle would be removed from their platform.

Eventbrite made the decision to remove the raffle and refund all ticketholders without USA Cares’ knowledge.

USA Cares staff participated in Eventbrite training and discussed in detail all events and raffles that would take place during 2018 using Eventbrite’s platform. We were not notified that any of our proposed events were in conflict with Eventbrite’s Terms of Service, and proceeded with the raffles as planned. During this time, Eventbrite changed their Terms of Service to “disallow listings whose sole purpose is to promote and sell raffle tickets,” without contacting USA Cares of the change. Five days before the raffle was to be drawn, Eventbrite removed our raffle from their platform and sent participants refund emails without notifying USA Cares prior to doing so.

During our investigation into this incident, Eventbrite took responsibility for the break in communication regarding the removal of the raffle from their platform, issuing this statement to USA Cares:

“Unfortunately we did not locate this raffle listing as part of our daily raffle detection until earlier this week, but this should have been flagged earlier by our system and we’ve made improvements to better flag these in the future. We apologize that you did not receive an email notification when the action was taken to refund and remove your event. Our normal practice is to proactively communicate any changes with our customers and an email was attempted to be sent but we learned this morning that the email system failed and the email was therefore not sent to you. This was an error on our side, and were very sorry for the resulting lack of communication.”

- Eventbrite Trust and Safety

Due to these events, the raffle will not take place on March 5, as originally planned. To ensure we maintain the integrity of our organization and our integrity with you, refunds will be issued and we will follow up with each of you in the coming weeks to confirm you received your refund.

I apologize for the inconvenience this issue has caused and we are taking measures to prevent it from happening in the future.

I appreciate your understanding, patience and support for USA Cares. Thank you for being a part of our mission to make a difference.